LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE (DAY FOR NIGHT)
NICOLAS DELPRAT
La nuit américaine (''Day for night'') is the title given to the exhibition in reference to a light filtering technique used in the cinema to obtain a night-like atmosphere during scenes shot in broad daylight. Since 2007, the transforming effects on spaces realised with artificial lightening occupy the pictural fields constructed by Nicolas Delprat. His paintings are a moving surface, sometimes theatrical, in which the history of their creation is narrated.
“Go brighter on the blackness” is how the artist describes the process which nowadays defines his way of painting. The exhibition mainly hinges on two series of paintings, started in 2018 and still in progress. They are entitled “James” and “Dan”, followed by a number, and they come from the memory of how he was dazzled after he saw light installations of the American artists James Turrell and Dan Flavin [1]. Developed from this remembrance phenomenon – or residual memory – these series have progressively orientated the artist’s practice towards exploring painting as a trace, as a remain from a set of gestural operations settled in advance - through a protocol for some of them, and spontaneously for some other.
The strong involvment of the body, but also of the memory - which are at the root of these images - does not appear in an excess material, as one may assume. On the contrary, it expresses itself through a complex process of smoothing by burying, by methodically erasing the steps of creation of the painting which cautiously keeps them in its different layers. It definitively does not fit it the register of expression but in the recording of “precepts” ’ [2] on a tangible roll – which, in Nicolas Delprat’s work, is called “painting” - and comes to reveal itself afterwards.
By erasing the depth of the painting, Delprat turns his surface into a vibrating area, made of constant interactions between its different layers.The canvas is a surfacing area where what comes from the deep end of the painting meets what seems to come from the outside and be thrown on it, just like on a screen. This double lightening sometimes creates a back-light impression, as if we were looking at it from a bad angle, compared to what could be seen.
What could be more pictural than the story of a vision adjusted through hypothesis, trials and errors? This story; each painting tells it and moves us through it, toying with the ambivalence between image and picturality to initiate us into what can’t be seen. Nicolas Delprat seems to be getting down to this specific narration towards the temporality of the painting and its stratification, in a way every time more exclusive. He progressively goes from figurative paintings (filled with american cinema references, and leaning on the narrative power coveyed by its stereotypes) to other ones, still more intriguing and atmospheric.The watcher gets locked in a threshold, an in-between space which requires to gaze beyond.
Actually, as Hans Belting writes it about the compositional process of photographer Jeff Wall – an artist inspired by a pictural imaginary – “the setting creates the image, to the extent that it prevents the story told from having one single outcome. The artist stands by the fact that the essence of the image only has to do with the ‘game of uncertainty’ [3]”
In Delprat’s paintings, lots of gestures are hidden in the backstage to set the scene, the appearence of the gaze: break up the surface with tapes and covers, filtering the light, play with the transparency and the opacity of the layers, reveal some places and hide others ones…
The awareness of “creating space through gesture”, just like a dancer or a performer would, progressively leads the painter to make the ingredients for his art appear more and more by inventing unveiling protocoles. But he does it in a detached way, as his repertoire of gestures consists in – against all odds – dripping, splashing, and spray-painting. Through this debunking exercise, Delprat shows us that beyond these incessant questions about what is realistic, figurative or abstract, the effect created by the painting lies essentially in a set of rules that the spectator choses to follow or not. Who cares, for instance, about the absurd positioning of the blood spatters on Holopherme’s neck, that Judith beheads, in the famous painting by Le Cavarage? Blood is, above all, a drip of paint, an assertion of the picturality at the cost of any coherence constaint.
Even if the blue, yellow or pink tones of the American nights betray the artificial nature of the color filters put on the video camera in the final scenes of Murnau’s most famous film, isn’t Nosferatu still as frightening?
By experementing the instrumental potential of the pictural device, Nicolas Delprat plays with the gap between what painting is and what looks like painting [4]. The artist increases the uncertainty of the image and its fictional power through the effects of a painting that he turned into a material for imagination.
Marguerite Pilven, art critc and curator.
[1] James Turell is an American artist, born in 1943, whose works rely on creating sensorial spaces in architectures, through light installations which deform their perception. Dan Flavin is an American artist, born in 1933, who creates fluorescent tubes installations which the strong rays of light reshape the spaces where they are exhibited and sometimes encircle them with coloured halos.
[2] This notion is used according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition: « a set of perceptions and sensations which remains after those who experience them».
[3] Hans Belting, An anthropology of images, p.298, Gallimard, 2009.
[4] Hans Belting, ibid.